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Comment by vuggamie | Hacker News Reader

The best part of MacOS for me is the unix tools. The command line is a real unix command line. And the rest just works. If I need a linux environment I ssh into a VPS.

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> If I need a linux environment I ssh into a VPS.

I want good window management. Linux gives me a huge number of options. MacOS - not as much.

Unix tools that are barely supported by an external community via brew or macports? Mac is not a dev machine. It is a dev hostile machine.

It doesn't matter for everyone/most. But, yes, having a Unix command line within MacOS is a pretty big win for some of us. Not something I use on a daily basis certainly. And I'd probably set up a Linux box (or ssh into one) if I really needed that routinely. But it's a nice bonus.

Well, kind of.. the commands on Mac OS all just a little bit different and a little bit janky. I still had to relearn all the common commands I use in order to function. I survived 6 months before I went back to a Windows/WSL combo.

If you want the GNU versions of tools rather than the Mac POSIX versions, then brew can help replace your bin directory with all the GNU niceties.

If you're talking about hardware interaction from the command line, that's very different and I don't think there's a fix.

Notice the op said Unix not Linux. Gnu made a lot of incompatible changes from the Unix tools it was cloning. Many people in the Linux community prefer the GNU quirks (they are definitely more performance optimized for example). But if you are talking about Unix, the FreeBSD derived userland on a Mac has real Unix lineage.

Or even just containers on the Mac. Unless you need a GPU with specific hardware, or to connect to a cluster, there's ever decreasing need to use remote boxes.

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